It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of an excess of masochism, must be in want of a job as MP. Well, maybe not acknowledged, but surely well evidenced.
And yet there is never any shortage of fresh faces sure that they can either fix the world or get famous without suffering the downsides.
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Jan Tinetti at the Privileges Committee hearing. Photo: Jane Patterson / RNZ
Privilege and...
In their maiden speeches MPs typically describe the role as an honour or privilege. It is. They don’t mention how brutal it is. Maybe they haven’t realised yet, and so that knowledge doesn't deter them from following the promptings of a deep well of optimism, or an overly healthy ego.
There are few if any other jobs that, no matter how well you do them, result in unhealthy levels of public abuse and vitriol. And that’s when you do well as an MP. If you screw up - heavens help you. That can lead to protracted sessions of public bloodletting.
Labour MP and Minister of Education Jan Tinetti screwed up royally a few months ago when she failed to promptly correct a factual error made in answer to a question during Question Time. That is more serious than it sounds.
Parliament operates on the basis that everyone (especially ministers), is taken at their word. If a minister says something that turns out to be untrue and then doesn’t correct it, that is considered misleading the House, a serious breach of what is referred to as Parliamentary Privilege. As Michael Woodhouse put it, “That [correction] is a fundamental corollary to the parliamentary privilege we hold.”
Tinetti corrected her error but only after being prompted to do so by the Speaker. As a result senior MPs from every party held an inquiry into her lapse in the committee that deals with MP behaviour - the Privileges Committee.
This week the House debated the unanimous report back from that multi-party group. The various speakers from the Committee were not gentle.
Michael Woodhouse for example declared that “...nothing the committee could do, I think, would be as bad as the damage to the Minister's reputation that she herself has imposed by her failure, by her gross negligence, by her serious errors of judgement.”
In most jobs if you screw up you might get berated in a quiet room. Maybe HR will offer a carefully worded verbal warning. For MPs the boss’s anger is only the beginning. After that all their misdeeds, errors, mistakes and personal frailties get discussed and dissected in public, and used as weapons to beat them with.
The only other people that come close to those levels of public dissection are losing All Black coaches. I frequently wonder why either group put themselves through it. Yes, MPs can achieve great things. But some people will hate them for that as well.
The necessary balance of power and responsibility
There are however good reasons for MPs being held to especially high standards. Labour MP David Parker (who as Attorney General chairs the Privileges Committee) outlined this.
“One of the ways that we maintain the reputation of this Parliament and the confidence of people in this Parliament is by upholding Standing Orders. …the Standing Orders need to be adhered to if this place is to work properly, and amongst the most important of those functions is the holding of the Government to account; the Government that spends money and has authority on behalf of the people to do very serious things. One of the most important ways in which Governments are held to account is through question time, and therefore, when [an answer] is wrong and misleads the House, it ought to be corrected at the earliest possible opportunity.”
And National’s Michael Woodhouse.
“The public has a right to expect that we treat our privileges seriously, that we act with honour, that we say what we believe to be the truth and, when it's found not to be, to quickly correct those misleading statements. That hasn't happened on this occasion, and that is an indictment on us all, and it's an expectation that we should all have to do better.”
It comes down to this. Ministers are powerful and must be held in check. Holding that leash is Parliament's job and it takes it seriously. Being an MP comes with rights and powers (what Parliament calls ‘Privilege’). The high expectations and the public slap-downs are part of an uneasy balance between power and responsibility. Maybe a healthy fear of the consequences of pushing beyond the rules is useful.
And there’s also, as Green MP Golriz Ghahraman points out, a desire not to be a country where the opposite is true and Ministers are a law unto themselves.
“So I think we actually should be proud that when something happens that doesn't sit right, that when processes in our democracy are not followed, that when question time—which is an absolute cornerstone of democratic transparency and accountability for the Government — may have been the theatre for inaccurate or less than accurate information being imparted by a Minister, we can respond by a referral to a parliamentary accountability mechanism that sits independently and that undertakes that work as seriously as we did.”